You would have to have been living under a rock for the past few years not to have heard of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an electronic cryptocurrency which can be used like cash in many web transactions. At time of writing there are about 15 million Bitcoins in circulation, trading at approximately $USD 360 each for a total value of about $USD 5.3 billion.
Bitcoin combines peer-to-peer technology and public key cryptography. The owner of a bitcoin can use a private key to assert ownership and authorize transactions – others can use the public key to validate the transaction. As in other peer to peer systems such as Bittorrent, there is no central server which maintains Bitcoin transactions – rather there is a distributed public ledger called the Blockchain. I wrote a short article on blockchain here.
The implications of cryptocurrencies is way beyond our scope here, but there are definite implications for database technologies in the Blockchain concept. Blockchain replaces the trusted third party that must normally mediate any transfer of funds. Rather than a centralized database that records transactions and authenticates each party, Blockchain allows transactions and identity to be validated by consensus with the Blockchain network – each transaction is confirmed by public-key based authentication from multiple nodes before being concluded. Blockchain could be as disruptive to our traditional notions of banking and non-monetary transactions as peer-to-peer systems like napster were to the music business.
The Blockchain underlying Bitcoin is public, but there can be private (or permissioned) Blockchains which are “invitation only”. Whether Private or public, Blockchains arguably represent a new sort of shared distributed database. Like systems based on the Dynamo model, the data in the block chain is distributed redundantly across a large number of hosts. However, the Blockchain represents a complete paradigm shift in how permissions are managed within the database. In an existing database system, the database owner has absolute control over the data held in the database. However in a Blockchain system, ownership is maintained by the creator of the data.
Consider a database that maintains a social network like Facebook: although the application is programmed to allow only you to modify your own posts or personal details, the reality is that the Facebook company actually has total control over your online data. They can – if they wish – remove your posts, censor your posts or even modify your posts if they really wanted to. In a Blockchain based database you would retain total ownership of your posts and it would be impossible for any other entity to modify them.
Applications based on Blockchain have the potential to disrupt a very wide range of social and economic activities. Transfers of money, property, management of global identity (passports, birth certificates), voting, permits, wills, health data, and a multitude of other transactional data could be regulated in the future by Blockchains. The databases that currently maintain records of these types of transactions may become obsolete.
Most database owners will probably want to maintain control of the data in the database, and therefore it’s unlikely that Blockchain will completely transform database technology in the short term. However it does seem likely that database systems will implement Blockchain based authentication and authorization protocols for specific application scenarios. Furthermore, it seems likely that formal database systems built upon a Blockchain foundation will soon emerge.
